Canadian Public Administration-Administration Publique Du Canada最新文献

This article considers the optimal structure of institutions that respond to existential threats such as climate change and pandemics. While science must play a central role in guiding policy responses, there are many values at stake that ought to be reflected in institutional design. There is a distinction between risk assessment, a science-driven analysis in these contexts, and risk management, in which trade-offs are considered in responding to the threats. Moreover, the nature of these threats depends on complex, uncertain and fluid scientific knowledge that requires institutions to be sensitive to communication challenges. Finally, institutions should consider collective action problems and defer or delegate to jurisdictions and institutions whose scope of mandate is appropriate. We assess the Canadian response to the COVID-19 pandemic from an institutional perspective and conclude that, amongst other things, it was insufficiently multidisciplinary, which risked marginalizing the non-public health costs of policy responses to the pandemic.

This short article provides a practitioner's perspective in response to Iacobucci and Trebilcock's (2022) article “Existential threats: Climate change, pandemics and institutions.” It offers some thoughts on: the many kinds of advisory bodies on whose advice governments can draw; the options for and constraints on institutional change; and what the federal and provincial governments could do to better equip themselves for dealing with the next “existential crisis.” The goal is to point to the full range of sources of scientific and policy advice for governments, to encourage better appreciation of when different sources of advice might be best served by different institutional underpinnings, and to emphasize the important role of the public service and “soft” machinery in fielding advice from diverse sources in an increasingly risky future.

More openness in the daily operation of public administrations is expected to increase their legitimacy and citizen trust in their activities. However, the effects generated by transparency reforms have raised numerous debates. Firstly, the relationship between transparency and trust can be multidirectional. Secondly, this relationship refers to a fragile balance since too much communication about sensitive issues may reduce citizen trust in public organizations. Finally, trust stems from multiple factors, thereby diminishing the impact of transparency. These various issues are analyzed and exemplified through concrete cases, based on a literature review of both scientific and media articles.

This article considers the tools and management approaches associated with the “digital-era” public sector reform, which many observers suggest has supplanted or should supplant previous reforms such as those associated with the New Public Management. This article levers and adapts the Competing Values Framework to categorize various public service reform movements—Traditional Public Administration, New Public Management, Public Value Management, and New Public Governance—and associated value systems and cultures. It argues that not only do these prior reform movements persist as values and repertoires in public service systems, but they are also each variously receiving oxygen from “digital” as the latest wave of technological innovation affecting societies, markets, and governments. It calls for more systematic empirical work to gauge how digital tools have been affecting the mix and balance of values and repertoires associated with these reform movements in different parts of public service systems in Canada and beyond.

Beginning in March of 2020, the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in the ways in which governments, and all organizations, performed many of their functions, including the ways in which they make decisions. In Westminster parliamentary democracies, the executive branch—with the support of the public service—has the capacity to respond quickly and decisively to matters at hand, which can make the system particularly well suited to deal with emergencies. However, the expedited approach can come at some cost in the sense that a higher tolerance for risk earlier in the process can create an increased need for problem-solving later on. This article explores how the Canadian government approached decision-making during the COVID-19 period, specifically within the period between March and August of 2020. Decision-making processes were truncated and modified to meet the challenges of the time, and the federal public service was widely praised for its nimbleness and responsiveness.

Although water sharing agreements have emerged as an important tool for improving First Nations water security in Canada, some communities are reluctant to sign them. In this article, we review the concerns raised by First Nations leaders and examine the extent to which existing water sharing agreements include provisions that might mitigate their concerns. To do so, we analyze the contents of 40 water agreements between First Nations and local communities in Canada and find that while many agreements do include provisions that seem to mitigate First Nations concerns, some concerns are left unaddressed or are inadequately addressed.

This article summarizes and expands on the work of one of three dialogue study teams organized by the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS), Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC), and the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration (CAPPA). The Internal Accountability Dialogue Study Team explored the rationale and effects of the performance management regime of the Canadian federal government starting the fall of 2021. In particular, the study team wanted to know whether and in what ways the performance management regime provided information and other support to decision-makers during the pandemic, and in what ways the efficacy of the function post-pandemic could be improved. It found that despite promises to bolster accountability and decision-making, and to foster a learning culture within government, it was subject to a strong control orientation reminiscent of traditional public administration (TPA) that obstructed its potential to contribute in effective ways. If anything, practitioners indicated that performance reporting was something to be avoided rather than embraced raising concerns about the usefulness of the function. The article concludes that performance management ought to be revisited with a clear orientation to learning rather than control, which may restore confidence in its relevance for decision-making.